Wesley Crichlow, Interdisciplinarity as Engaged Scholarship and Social Justice ActivismRuth Nicole Brown, Solhot (your funeral): A meditation on falling in and out of love, rearrangement, and change in my slow singing voiceGraduate Student Respondent: Sheri Lewis

abstracts

RUTH NICOLE BROWNSolhot (your funeral): A meditation on falling in and out of love, rearrangement, and change in my slow singing voice

Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) is a critical practice of Black girlhood celebration that does not exist outside of the re-disciplinarization, neoliberal engagement, and the corporatization of university life. Institutionally legible through interdisciplinary and engagement logics that reproduce insecurities and injury even as it grows the imaginations and critical skills necessary to hear how there is no work "out there" in the "community", how self care produces pathology, and how disengagement changes relations of power-- the creative potential of black girlhood persists. Drawing on women of color feminisms, Lindon Barrett’s conceptualization of “the singing voice”, and Baduian articulations of love and caution, rearrangement, and change, I offer a mediation on SOLHOT as paradoxical practice. Ultimately, I concede academic logics of interdisciplinarity and public engagement recreate racialized gendered dynamics of “black girl soldier” even as SOLHOT re-imagines us taking it from the top.

This essay invokes the history of the Western university and attendant ways of being and knowing – i.e., the onto-epistemologies of modernity – as context and condition for imagining the shapes and forms that interdisciplinarity might take today. I take as a point of departure the call for the defense of the humanities widely familiar in both academic and popular arenas, a call which heightens the curious and contradictory position of minority discourse practitioners – i.e., those strongly identified with politically-engaged forms of interdisciplinarity since the middle-late 20th century. While it is impossible to ignore the adverse effects of the corporatization and intensifying privatization of the university, neither is it possible to stand simply in defense of the disciplinary formations that have been and continue to be instrumental to the production and sustenance of social hierarchies. The humanities and their corollary disciplinary structures have been central to the organization and conduct of social life constituting the hegemonic forms of Western Civilization: Briefly, we might recall that the Renaissance renovation of education from the practical scholasticism of the medieval era to the cultivation of intellectual capacities marks a sea change in the constitution and orientation of higher education, especially with regard to the place and position of “the human” as object of study and politics. Consistent across this shift is that the studia humanitatis remained a measure of cultivation and erudition appropriate to the promise of humanity. This held true in and through the 18th and 19th century Western European bourgeois revolutions that ushered in the constellation of the structures and socialities of modernity, as humanities education is conceptualized as refining the liberal subject of the enlightenment and post-enlightenment eras. The history of the humanities and the disciplinary structures organizing their emergence captures in this sense the history of empire and capital, and bespeaks the onto-epistemologies that have been naturalized as common sense. In short, the histories and historicity of the humanities as a central part of the organization of the university precipitates, in response to the call for their defense, the question of just what it is we are enjoined to defend. Putting the question of the shapes and forms that interdisciplinarity might today take in relation to this long history of the organization of the university around these onto-epistemologies suggests that we might generatively see interdisciplinarity not so much as a corrective to or correlative of disciplinarity but instead as a pedagogy and practice of, to borrow Fred Moten’s formulation regarding black studies, “improvising Enlightenment” (in In the Break). Or in other words, interdisciplinarity might well be conceived as a force that continues to bring the university to crisis as it functions as a site through which the figure of Man and the normalizing discourses of which Sylvia Wynter writes are not only critiqued but also displaced. I use the occasion of this essay to invite us to consider what interdisciplinarity might be and do if it were orientated toward the address and transformation of the sensus communis – that is, if common sense and its naturalizing philosophies and structures are identified as the object and objectives of interdisciplinarity.

WESLEY CRICHLOWInterdisciplinarity as Engaged Scholarship and Social Justice Activism

I dedicate my academic work to social justice, community-university collaborations, and effective community empowerment models. I am devoted to pedagogical praxis (teaching as activism) and work with others to transform education and rehabilitation models to be more inclusive, culturally-relevant, and engaging for marginalized communities. The complexity of issues I have found in my social justice activism compell me to engage in interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary work. Drawing on my experience of grounded work in the politics and communities I come from, my presentation will explore how knowledge and information get transferred and translated to marginalized communities through the university as the mode of transportation. I ask: What language is used, who controls the politics, practices and language of marginalized and activist communities studied by universities? How is teaching activist? And, how can activist and marginalized produce scholarship and research that contributes to their struggles for justice?

JODI MELAMEDRace, Sexuality, Indigeneity: Interdisciplinarity on the Edge of Permissible RationalitiesThe crisis the Symposium’s call refers to as “the neoliberalizing public university” is a crisis in the conditions of knowledge production and a crisis in knowledge or what counts as knowledge. The material facts are well known: with the financialization of everything, we have an ever-increasing disparity between those who accumulate and command capital and those subject to old and new forms of dispossession. Universities fail to protest the fact that their condition of existence is now the financialization of higher education because they rely on logics of investment and human capital to legitimize academic work. Prior sentiments linking higher education to democracy offer little resistance. Even as ideologies of individualism, liberalism and democracy, conceptually bound to the capitalist rationalities, have come to monopolize the terms of social being like never before, they also appear increasingly hollow in the face of neoliberalism’s predations. In face of this stalemate, the task for public universities and interdisciplinary research is to constitute new forms of appearance for the social and how social forces can be actualized – beyond the interpretative limits of neoliberal democracy, its bundle of rights, notions of personhood and narrow constructions of possible ways to connect forms of humanity to one another, to land and to subsistence.To offer one genealogy of how we got here and to explain my schema of permissible and impermissible rationalities, I share my research on the university as an important site for generating and normalizing a succession of official or state-sanctioned antiracism – racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism – which have limited permissible rationalities of racial difference and antiracism to a set of liberal freedoms (possessive individualism, rights to self-cultivation and privacy, legal equality, citizenship, and access to the field of economic competition) which also generate, stabilize, and renew the knowledge architecture for global capitalist development under U.S. leadership. I describe the rise of interdisciplinary programs emerging coming out of social movements from the 68 period through the 1980s – Black, Chican@, American Indian, Asian American, and Women’s and Gender Studies – as an attempt to insert into the university rationalities of difference that make a difference, that, in distinction to dominant antiracisms (and a rising diversity industry that promises to manage human differences for profit) – make legible forms of difference - epistemological, cultural, interpretative, communal, association, material, and relational– which displace and defer capitalist globalization by challenging its ‘certainties’ about who can relate and under what terms. The institutionalization of the interdisciplines, however, is contradictory. As Rod Ferguson outlines in The Reorder of Things, power “attempt[s] to find new ways to make the articulation of difference consistent with power’s guidance rather than antagonistic to it.” In particular, the institutionalization of multiculturalism since the 1980s has set up the interdisciplines as a field of struggle, reflected in the serialism and separations of the interdisciplines themselves. Asking the question, “How can comparison be a form of violence?,” I endeavor to show that new comparative analytics emerging out of interdisciplinary research unite around dissatisfaction with rubrics of "nationalism" and "multiculturalism" and the hidden violences of their limited comparative analytics. These enforce the “certainties” of discreteness, distinctiveness, and discontinuity identified in the Symposium’s call, including regulative concepts of discrete identities and histories, the distinctiveness of U.S. citizenship and the U.S. nation-state, and discontinuities between domestic/foreign, political/economic, and rights/violences made anachronistic by globalization and neoliberalism. I describe and analyze the significance, synchronicity and interventions of new alternative comparative analytics, which remarkably exceed the frameworks of the interdisciplines from which they emerge. Surveying approaches signaled by the enabling concept metaphors of "affinity," "assemblage," "queer of color," and "transit" among others, I argue that we can think of these as not just alternative, but more appropriately as alterrelational comparative analytics. Against the play of permissible and impermissible rationalities that capitalism uses to expropriate collective life by enforcing social separateness (or rather, rusing that the social relations which reproduce neoliberal democratic capitalism are the only imaginable and actionable ones), these new analytics offer ways to dismantle partitions between forms of humanity and provide the rationality for other senses of social being (non-capitalist, non-state). In particular, I argue for the importance of indigenous critical theory and indigenous-led activism for the task of making legible and showing the viability of kinds of relations and arrangements of social forces that offer alternatives to state/capital binds. The centrality of indigeneity proceeds 1) from the global resource wars and the encroachment by capital on ever more lands and natural resources, including a large percentage of land lived on, sustained by, and inseparable from the embodiment of indigenous sovereignty and 2) from the conceptual distance of decolonization struggles from the inclusions of settler colonial multiculturalism, the rejection of bundles of rights that turn land into property, and robustness of relational epistemological frameworks that think practices of constituting collectivities (which can also include nonhuman beings).

SUZANNE OBOLER“It has not always been the same racism”: Rethinking Latino/as’ Citizenship and Belonging in the Era of Disposable StrangersThis paper seeks to historically assess the social location, and the corresponding experience of belonging, of people of Latin American descent in the United States, increasingly (re)defined through the changing meanings and social value of the term “Mexicans.” Framed by the current social and cultural instabilities created by globalization’s relentless destruction of community, it focuses on three particular designations simultaneously attributed to people of Mexican descent –“citizens”, “historical minorities”, and immigrants—to trace the process through which, regardless of citizenship, Mexican Americans, like all Latino/as today, have now become transformed into “disposable strangers” in the United States.

MARIA JOSEFINA SALDANA-PORTILLOLoosing It! Indigenous Ancestry and Melancholic IncorporationsCultural critics of Chicana/o nationalism have long considered the claiming of Aztlán as a Chicana/o homeland a necessary, if mythical, recuperation. Whether or not Aztlán ever existed is irrelevant, for the myth of Aztlán—and Chicana/o indigenismo more generally—enabled the reconstruction of a people as full with the history and dignity of belonging. A recuperation in the face of U.S. racial discrimination that had denigrated Mexican Americans for over a century. Native American critics have been quick to chastise Aztlán as a colonialist appropriation, as the mythical homeland encompasses the territory of hundreds of specific Native peoples, and to challenge Chicana/o claims of indigeneity. One man's mythic foundation is another's colonial nightmare. But what if we thought of Aztlán not as a myth but as a melancholic state of being; the indigenous ancestry claimed by Chicano/as as less of an origin story than a lost object. This talk investigates the loss at the center of Chicana/o identity and cultural production. The loss of the Indian was a requirement of U.S. citizenship, but this loss led to an ambivalent incorporation of the figure of the Indian into the ego structure of a people. I begin with a brief account of the legal cases that denied Mexican Americans the right to claim indigenous heritage, revealing the racial unconscious of U.S. jurisprudence in the process. I then discuss the melancholic loss of the banished Indian as the productive fount of identity over the long arc of Chicana/o culture, beginning with a consideration of Zeta Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, continuing with Castillo's Mixquiahuala Letters, and ending with a comparison of Rodriquez's El Machete and Estrada's El Infierno. Both were released to critical acclaim in 2010, though on opposite sides of the U.S./Mexico border. The difference in the way these two films represent indigeneity—the distinct uses they make of Indian iconography within the film—elucidates the true divide between Mexicans and Chicana/os: the utopic/dystopic divide in psychic registers and racial geographies.